Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 48, No. 1, January 2003

Once over the first hurdle, Darwin was drinking as happily as anyone. “We should not blame Isaac Newton,” he said. “It is Elias Barton who should be double damned. I searched thoroughly, and the papers describing Newton’s alchemic work were nowhere in his rooms or laboratory. They are lost forever. And it is a great loss. Newton, with his great powers, may have advanced far along the road of chemical discovery that Mr. Priestley and Monsieur Lavoisier, close to a century later, are beginning to mark out.”

“A loss forever,” Wentworth said. “But just possibly not.” He stood up suddenly, knocking wine glasses over on the table. “When I was called to Elias Barton’s body this morning, I noticed at the far end of Kitchen Lane a mess of blown papers. Suspecting undergraduate foolery, I ordered them collected up. But if Elias Barton had been holding the alchemic papers in his hand when he stepped off the roof—”

“Their subsequent fate?” Darwin spoke, but all came to their feet.

“God help us, old papers are treated as waste and used to light fires.” Wentworth frowned. “But they would have been wet from the storm, and not burned until thoroughly dried. There is a chance.”

He was gone. The others sat frozen, with even Darwin reduced to silence until Wentworth returned. He was holding in his arms a bulging brown sack.

“Thank the storm for its favors. Trelawney said that every foolscap sheet found this morning in Kitchen Lane was collected and placed in this bag. But all were wet. Drying had not yet begun. We have everything!”

He placed the sack on the table, opened its neck, and reached within with both hands. Slowly and carefully, he pulled forth a great mass of paper. The sheets were wet, set at all angles, and stuck together. Carefully, one by one, Wentworth peeled loose pages and handed them to the eager onlookers.

“Well?” He was still at work separating sheets, while the others observed a total silence.

“Written in ink,” said Darwin, “but of a type soluble in water. The words of genius, perhaps immortal words, washed away drop by drop — to the cobblestones, to the gutters, to the River Cam, to the North Sea.”

“All?” Wentworth ceased separating the pages and looked up.

Three heads nodded. “Nothing here,” Jacob Pole said sadly. “Maybe the odd word or handful of letters, half distinguishable. But no philosopher’s stone.”

“And no leap forward of centuries in chemical knowledge,” said Darwin. “Nothing to foreshadow or even surpass the discoveries made in our own time.”

“And no new mathematics.” Athene Selfridge alone appeared undismayed. “These pages might as well be blank. But is that not as it should be? This generation, and those that come after us, should not be content to trace the words of former genius. The future should be as a tabula rasa, on which new words and thoughts may be inscribed.” She put down the page that she was holding. “You asked me to propose a toast, and I did so. With your permission I will now offer another. Let us drink not only to the great Isaac, but to those minds of the near or far future, who will carry our ideas as far beyond today as Newton carried us beyond the notions of Aristotle.”

Every glass was raised, and every man drank. But on Darwin’s face alone sat the expression of one who comprehended the toast in full, and was overwhelmed by it.

He regarded with approval the bright gray eyes and young intensity of Athene Selfridge. But for the first time in his life, he felt old.

Author’s note: This story takes place in 1776. In 1981, St. John’s College, Cambridge, opened its doors to women students for the first time.

The Facts Concerning the Carnival of Crime at Christmas by S. L. Franklin

Part I

I think of it less as a Christmas crime, to tell the truth, than as a crime of the 1980’s. And not because it had that much to do with Reaganomics or slash-and-grab greed — although the second of these was evident in a way — but because it took place at a shopping mall. The eighties, of course, were a boom time for malls. I personally shouldn’t complain, since the security-consulting half of my business at the time depended to a great degree on malls, but it was true as well that the criminals in this particular case couldn’t have succeeded the way they did at first without a mall to operate in.